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Forum on Samir Amin's Proposal for A JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 25 Issue 2 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.951 | jwsr.pitt.edu FORUM ON SAMIR AMIN’S PROPOSAL FOR A NEW INTERNATIONAL OF WORKERS AND PEOPLES Samir Amin, a leading scholar and co-founder of the world-systems tradition, died on August 12, 2018. Just before his death, he published, along with close allies, a call for ‘workers and the people’ to establish a ‘fifth international’ to coordinate support to progressive movements. To honor Samir Amin’s invaluable contribution to world-systems scholarship, we are pleased to present our readers with a selection of essays responding to Amin’s final message for today’s anti-systemic movements. This forum is being co-published between Globalizations, the Journal of World-Systems Research, and Pambazuka News. Readers can find additional essays and commentary in these outlets. The following essay has been published in Globalizations and is being reproduced here with permission. The Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Internationalism: A World- Historical Perspective Sahan Savas Karatasli University of North Carolina at Greensboro [email protected] Since the turn of the 21st century, we have been experiencing rapid intensification of revolutionary situations, social revolts and rebellions on a global scale (Badiou 2012; Žižek 2012; Mason 2012; Thernborn 2014; Chase-Dunn and Nagy 2019; Karatasli, Kumral, Scully, & Upadhyay 2014; Mason 2012; Therborn 2014; Žižek 2012). This is not an ordinary wave of social unrest. It belongs to one of the major world historical waves of mobilization (see Silver and Slater 1999) which has the potential to transform political structures, economic systems and social relations. Recent research shows that the frequency and the geographical spread of social unrest around the world in the post-2008 era are exceptionally high, making it one of the major waves of social mobilization in the long twentieth century (Karatasli et al 2018). Furthermore, the number of revolutionary © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article was first published in Globalizations, and is reproduced with permission. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Journal of World-Systems Research | Vol. 25 Issue 2 | Samir Amin’s New International 307 situations in the 2010-2014 period are almost equal to the 1915-1919 period (Beissinger 2018). Hence structural and objective conditions of another round of world-historical transformation seem to be almost as fertile as it was a century ago. There are also other interesting similarities between the current moment and the early twentieth century that might help us make sense of the current era we are living in. For instance, similar to the early twentieth century, the major wave of social revolts and revolutions that we have experienced in the twenty-first century has been taking place in synchrony with interlinked political-economic and geopolitical crises on a world scale (Fominaya 2017; Wallerstein 2012; Karatasli 2018). In the previous era, the intensification of economic and geopolitical crises that spanned roughly from 1870 to 1940s had undermined the foundations of the British world- hegemony and gave birth to the U.S. world hegemony, which transformed the way historical capitalism operated (Arrighi 1994). Today, since the 1970s, we have been experiencing similar interlinked crises in economic and geopolitical spheres, which have been undermining the U.S. world hegemony, and signaling that capitalism can no longer operate in the way it used to do. Hence from such a world-historical perspective, it can be argued that we are living in a period analogous to the “chaos” phase of the decline of the British world-hegemony in the early twentieth century (Arrighi and Silver 1999). Moreover, like the early twentieth century, the rise of social unrest in twenty-first century has widely been interpreted as a counter-movement to the rise of self-regulating markets and commodification (Burawoy 2012; Fraser 2017; see Polanyi 1944). Both periods reversed the previous trends of trade globalization and unleashed a period of de- globalization in the world-economy (Alvarez and Chase-Dunn 2018; also see Chase-Dunn and Gills 2005). In both periods, world-wide social mobilization was accompanied by nationalist movements that started to challenge existing territorial maps of the world (Karatasli 2018), and were followed by the rise of far-right groups and parties around the world (Chase-Dunn and Nagy 2019). We can easily extend the list of such similarities. Focusing only on similarities, however, will conceal the radical differences between the socio-political climates of these two periods. One major difference is that in the early twentieth century many of these revolutionary situations produced revolutionary outcomes. Put differently, while the communist, socialist and national liberation movements in the early 20th century failed to fulfill their promises in the long run, they were spectacularly successful in the short and medium run (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein 2012). Especially the success of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the rising tide of proletarian revolutions and national liberation movements went beyond the preceding historical examples of the 1871 Paris commune and 1905 revolutions by demonstrating that the exploited, the oppressed and the excluded could take power, establish their own states, invent new modes of governments and successfully defend it against the ruling classes and imperialist states. In short, despite all of their shortcomings, the revolutions that took place in the early 20th century were unprecedented world-historical achievements. Today the picture we see, however, is quite different. The overwhelming majority of revolutionary situations that could potentially transform the world have failed to make their bids for such a change. Neither the occupy-type anti-austerity movements in Europe and North America jwsr.pitt.edu | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.951 Journal of World-Systems Research | Vol. 25 Issue 2 | Karatasli 308 nor the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa nor the rising labor militancy and pro- democracy movements in East Asia have so far made an impact compared to the revolts and revolutions of the early 20th century (Springborg 2011). Of course, we should be careful in this assessment because this period is not yet over. We will probably continue to see rounds of interconnected waves of social unrest in years to come as the crisis of the U.S. world hegemony further unfolds. Moreover, we should keep in mind that success is a relative and highly subjective term for evaluating social movement outcomes. From a certain perspective, it has been argued that the movements of the early 21st century have already been very successful in “changing the subject” (Milkman et al 2013) by turning attention—for the first time in a long while—to the issues of capitalism, class, inequality and democracy. Likewise, it has been suggested that these movements have been extremely successful in demonstrating that spontaneous, horizontal and leaderless movements can be very effective in opening spaces “for people to voice their concerns and desires” (Sitrin 2012). While these observations are correct, they employ a very low threshold for assessing social change. Despite their contribution to turning attention to these issues, the progressive counter-movements in the 21st century have not slowed down or reversed Polanyi’s (1944) marketization pendulum in a way that would reduce the rate of commodification of land, labor and money. Of course, rising protests and conflicts have overturned governments in many places such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Ukraine. Yet, in none of these places (probably except for Kurds in Rojava1), have movements representing the exploited, the oppressed and the excluded sections of the society managed to take power. In most cases, movements in the 21st century ended up replacing one type of authoritarianism for another type. Even according to bourgeois-democratic standards, we have been experiencing a major failure. Divergent Trends of the “Marxist Century” and the “American Century” I argue that the differential outcomes of the revolutionary waves of 1915-1919 and 2010-2014 have their roots in the asymmetrical evolution of the ideological and organizational structures of social movements in the course of what Arrighi (1990) called the “Marxist Century” (i.e. the long nineteenth century) and the “American Century” (i.e. the long twentieth century). Today, the dominant tendency is to explain these divergent trends as an outcome of a switch from vertical to horizontal organizational structures in social movements (Sitrin 2012; Mason 2013). While this distinction is not altogether wrong, it does not capture the essence of the problem. The issues at stake are more complex than verticalism and horizontalism. Divergent trends in these two long centuries can better be understood by examining the different attitudes of movements towards “voluntarism” and “spontaneity” (Gramsci 1971:196- 205) in the two centuries. In the early 19th century, vertically organized revolutionary movements in Europe—such as the Carbonari and the various proto-communist organizations founded by Buonarroti, Barbes and Blanqui after the example of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals—were 1 The Kurds in Rojava, who were a part of this most recent revolutionary wave, have managed to produce a completely different outcome. Using the revolutionary opportunities produced by the Syrian Arab Spring and the Syrian internationalized civil war, Kurds took up arms, gained de facto control of their territory and have started to transform the social, economic and political relationships in their region. jwsr.pitt.edu | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.951 Journal of World-Systems Research | Vol. 25 Issue 2 | Samir Amin’s New International 309 voluntarists (see Greene 2017; Draper 1986:123-127). Their approach to revolution took into account neither objective conditions (e.g.
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